Canonical в yoast seo

Individual level

These companies have 1 – 10 employees and at least 1 employee has all the Yoast Academy certificates.

Radish Concepts

If you are looking for an agency that collaborates with Yoast in a very tight way, you found it: we work together on the Local SEO plugin. Radish Concepts radically improves your site for more revenue. Black belts in WordPress.

• Custom WordPress development
• High traffic sites
• Site speed optimizations
• Miscellaneous connections with API services

English, Dutch • 7 employees • Enschede, The Netherlands

Find out more about Radish Concepts on their website:radishconcepts.com

WP Servicepoint

Premier WordPress Service company with over 15 years of WordPress experience combined. We are a team of WordPress experts dedicated to the success of your business. We provide outstanding WordPress services, support and maintenance to give you peace of mind.

• WordPress maintenance plans
• SEO service
• Site speed optimization
• Code fixes & design changes.

English, Dutch • 2 employees • Netherlands

Find out more about WP Servicepoint on their website:wpservicepoint.com

A new architecture ready for new features

One of the main benefits of indexables is what we can build on top of it. Rethinking Yoast SEO with indexables in mind, helped us build a new information architecture that will allow us to add and expand sitewide SEO features. The architecture makes our code easier to maintain and improve, while also helping us build new and complex features more quickly. 

One of the first features built on top of indexables is our new headless WordPress API. Developers using headless WordPress installs can now generate metadata from a frontend request. Thanks to a simple metadata endpoint, developers can use the REST API to grab the data and output it wherever they want.

A streamlined interface

When you first install Yoast SEO 7.0, you’ll find that a lot has changed. Several menu items have been changed, moved or deleted. We wanted to make the interface as easy to understand and navigate as possible. We did everything we could to simplify the configuration and use of the plugin.

The new menu has just a couple items in it, including one that might not ring a bell yet. Titles and Metas has become Search Appearance; a much easier to understand name, because it does what it says on the tin. This is the place where you determine how your site appears in search engines.

So, these are a couple of the visual changes:

• Titles and Metas is now Search Appearance.
• General and Homepage have been combined.
• The XML sitemap settings now depend on the search indexing settings.
• The toggles in the Advanced features tab have been deprecated, moved or merged.
• Breadcrumbs and RSS can now be found under Search Appearance.
• The text link counter calculator is now in Tools.
• The Media menu item is brand-new.
• Every feature toggle is now in General > Features.

All-in-one SEO suites

Want to use comprehensive tools that bundle multiple features mentioned above? Then you might want to check these:

Ryte

Ryte is one of the primary tools we use to analyze the on-page SEO of a website. It analyzes if a website is indexable, by checking HTTP status codes, robots.txt file, canonicals, redirects, and pagination. It analyzes your site structure, and your link and URL structure and checks for flaws in your XML sitemap. On top of that, it will give you information on your site’s performance by checking response time and page speed.

Searchmetrics.com

Another complete SEO suite is Searchmetrics. This tool mainly focuses on visibility. It calculates this with a bunch of metrics like how often your page and on which position it appears for a search term in a certain search engine. You can check your visibility changes over time, so you get an impression if your SEO efforts are effective.

Sistrix

Sistrix is a similar tool as Searchmetrics, it only calculates visibility in a slightly different way. Apart from visibility, both tools will also provide lots of information on on-page SEO factors and backlinks.

Инструменты

Тут содержится несколько очень мощных инструментов, которые мы сейчас рассмотрим.

Импорт и экспорт

В первой вкладке этого инструмента вы сможете импортировать настройки параметров Yoast Seo. Эта функция будет полезна для быстрого добавления настроек. Для этого необходимо просто вставить в строку параметры и кликнуть «Импортировать настройки».

Далее, во второй вкладке у вас будет возможность сохранить ваши настройки для дальнейшего импорта. Скопируйте все в отдельный файл и сохраните для переноса. Вы сможете использовать их на другом сайте.

В последней вкладке вы сможете импортировать настройки из других SEO плагинов. Это пригодится, если вы к примеру, раньше использовали плагин All-in-Seo-Pack и решили перейти на Yoast Seo. То с помощью этой функции вы сможете с легкостью импортировать свои настройки и перейти на новый плагин.

Редактор файлов

У вас теперь есть возможность быстро отредактировать robots.txt и .htaccess из админ. панели (при их наличии). Даже в случае отсутствия, вы сможете в этом пункте с легкостью создать их, обычно это встречается на молодых сайтах. Это важные файлы для вашего сайта, например с помощью файла .htaccess можно защитить свой сайт, но будьте аккуратны, неправильные параметры могут привести к плохим последствиям, поэтому я предлагаю ознакомиться со статьей по его настройке, ссылки я оставил ниже. Файл robots.txt необходим для правильной индексации вашего сайта поисковыми роботами. Смотрите об этих файлах подробнее:

Пример robots txt

Пример htaccess

Групповой редактор

Этот инструмент дает возможность вам быстро изменить заголовки (title) и описания (description) ваших записей и страниц, без открытия их отдельно в редакторе.

Счетчик текстовых ссылок

Он посчитает все внутренние ссылки на вашем сайте. Об этом я подробно написал выше,

Ниже вы можете посмотреть видео, в котором подробно рассказывается о настройках плагина.

Available variable types

Basic variables

Label	Variable	Description
Date		Replaced with the date of the post/page
Title		Replaced with the title of the post/page
Parent title		Replaced with the title of the parent page of the current page
Archive title		Replaced with the normal title for an archive generated by WordPress
Site title		The site’s name
Tagline		The site’s tagline
Excerpt		Replaced with the post/page excerpt (or auto-generated if it does not exist)
Excerpt only		Replaced with the post/page excerpt (without auto-generation)
Tag		Replaced with the current tag/tags
Category		Replaced with the post categories (comma separated)
Primary category		Replaced with the primary category of the post/page
Category description		Replaced with the category description
Tag description		Replaced with the tag description
Term description		Replaced with the term description
Term title		Replaced with the term name
Search phrase		Replaced with the current search phrase
Separator		The separator defined in your theme’s wp_title() tag.

Term template variables are used with custom taxonomies. If you do not have a custom taxonomy use either the tag or category template variables.

Advanced variables

The following sample of variables requires a better understanding of SEO. If you’re unsure how to use these advanced variables, we advise you not to use them. You can learn more about SEO, in our online Yoast SEO academy courses.

Label	Variable	Description
Post type (singular)		Replaced with the content type single label
Post type (plural)		Replaced with the content type plural label
Modified		Replaced with the post/page modified time
ID		Replaced with the post/page ID
Name		Replaced with the post/page author’s ‘nicename’
User description		Replaced with the post/page author’s ‘Biographical Info’
Page number		Replaced with the current page number with context (i.e. page 2 of 4)
Pagetotal		Replaced with the current page total
Pagenumber		Replaced with the current page number
Caption		Attachment caption
Focus keyword		Replaced with the posts focus keyphrase
Term404		Replaced with the slug which caused the 404
<custom-field-name> (custom field)		Replaced with a posts custom field value. Remove the <>
<custom-tax-name> (custom taxonomy)		Replaced with a posts custom taxonomies, comma separated. Remove the <>
<custom-tax-name> description (custom taxonomy)		Replaced with a custom taxonomies description. Remove the <>

Custom variables

The last three advanced variables can be used to output data from non-standard WordPress elements, such as . But, how do you find the name of the correct field or taxonomy to use these variables?

Custom fields

Custom field names can be found using the steps . Once you have the custom field name, you will replace . If my custom field was called, the custom variable would be . Or, if the custom field begins with an underscore, for example , the custom variable should include the underscore like so: .

Note: Custom fields that contain arrays (a list of related information) will not work with the custom field variable. Instead, you or your developer should .

Custom taxonomies

Custom taxonomy names can be found in the browser bar on the backend when viewing or editing an item.

Example: edit-tags.php?taxonomy=mycategory&post_type=myposttype

In the example above, we are editing a custom taxonomy called mycategory under a custom post type called myposttype. If I wanted to output a list of categories assigned to a myposttype page, I would use . Alternatively, if I wanted to output the description of an individual mycategory on the category archive page, I would use  .

WooCommerce variables

The following are some variables you may use with WooCommerce. If the specific variable you are looking for is not listed below, please use the custom variable information above to find the variable you need.

	Product category (comma separated)
	Product tag (comma separated)
	Product attribute (comma separated). Be sure to remove the <> as they are not needed.

Yoast WooCommerce SEO variables

When you are using our Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin, these additional variables are available.

	Replaced with the short description of the product. (Available as of Yoast WooCommerce SEO 6.2)
	Replaced with the inventory stock-keeping unit (sku) of the product. (Available as of Yoast WooCommerce SEO 6.2)
	Replaced with the brand name. This variable only works with ‘WooCommerce Brands‘ and ‘Perfect WooCommerce Brands‘ plugins. (Available as of Yoast WooCommerce SEO 6.2)
	Replaced with price of the product. (Available as of Yoast WooCommerce SEO 6.2)

How does the redirect manager work?

We told you it is easy, but to convince you, we also need to show it. Here is how the redirect manager works.

After deleting a post or page our plugin will immediately ask you what you’d like to do with the old URL. To make things easier, it also gives you the most common options to choose from.

And there more good news! When you decide to change the URL of an existing post or page, Yoast SEO Premium automatically creates a redirect from the old to the new URL. You don’t even have to think about it!

Want to get an overview of your redirects? Or need more options? Go to Redirects under the SEO menu item on your left-hand side. Here you can easily enter the old URL and the new one you’d like to redirect it to. You can select the type of redirect and you’re done!

Need some more convincing? Here’s is a video message from Joost, explaining what the redirect manager does and why you need it!

This is only the beginning

Today, however, we’re still talking about Schema at a smaller scale, but there’s so much more on the horizon. While adopting is speeding up, it’s still early days for Schema. Google is pushing structured data hard, so expect this to grow for years to come. Almost every pretty new thing is powered by structured data.

This is a big chance for sites, so if you describe your contents with Schema you’re helping search engines like Google make sense of your content. In the future, it can also become the main driver for new (social) platforms and tools. Hopefully, powered by the Yoast SEO Schema framework! For now, we’re helping you build an awesome Schema.org implementation using Yoast SEO.

We’re deeply excited about all of this and think we’re on to something really big.

How to use your keyphrase in the SEO title

Sometimes, when you’re optimizing for a high-competition keyword, everyone will have the keyword at the beginning of the page title. In that case, you can try making it stand out a bit by putting one or two words in front of your focus keyword, thereby slightly “indenting” your result. In Yoast SEO, for example, if you start your SEO title with “the”, “a”, “who” or some other function word, followed by your keyphrase, you’ll still get a green bullet.

Other times, like when you have a very long keyphrase, adding the complete keyphrase at the beginning doesn’t make sense. If your SEO title looks weird with the keyphrase at the beginning, try to add as much of the keyphrase as you can, as early in the SEO title as possible.

A better information architecture for WordPress

From an SEO perspective, any type of page in WordPress is simply an indexable object. This is the basic intuition that has led to indexables. In its core, indexables is just a database table that contains metadata and URLs for all indexables on a site. The abstraction normalizes the information architecture for any type of page in WordPress and makes its metadata directly queryable. On top of that, we can now easily and economically relate different indexable objects to each other and to other things, such as links, redirects, attachments, and perhaps even schema markup.

Looking for more background on indexables and the future it holds? Read Omar’s post The exciting technology that is indexables

Video SEO tied into the Yoast SEO Schema graph

Our Video SEO add-on for Yoast SEO helps your videos to show up in video search. In this new release, we make the plugin even more useful by adding the correct structured data. Not only that, we’ll also tie everything into the main graph as generated by Yoast SEO.

In the structured data code, you’ll find everything search engines need to make sense of the video, from duration to embed URL, and from video thumbnail to description. Search engines like Google may use this information to get your video into a carousel or give it a badge so it can be distinguished as a video in image search thumbnails.

We use Schema’s to output the correct structured data and made video a real entity in our graph. The beauty of it is that you don’t need to do anything out of the ordinary to get search engines to pick up your video. Simply give it good meta data like titles and descriptions, add an attractive thumbnail and you’re good to go! The plugin will automatically generate all the valid Schema code in the background.

You can find more information about Schema structured data in our Video SEO Schema documentation.

Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool validates this video nicely

Questions and answers spoken out loud?

Google is trying to match a question from a searcher to an answer from a source. If you mark up your questions and answers with FAQ structured data, you tell search engines that this little sentence is a question and that this paragraph is its answer. And all these questions and answers are related to the main topic of the page.

Paragraph-based content is all the rage. One of the reasons? The advent of voice search. Google is looking for easy to understand, block-based content that it can use to answer searchers questions right in the search engine — or by speaking it out loud. Using the Schema property speakable might even speed up this content discovery by determining which part of the content is fit for text-to-speech conversion. Find out more about what’s powering conversational search.

Adding structured data to your site with WordPress or Google Tag Manager

In general, adding structured data requires you to edit the code of your pages. For most people, that requires help of their developers. As you see, there is an easier way. Yoast SEO adds a lot of structured data by itself, and the Schema tab lets you chose specific content types for your pages and posts. Find out more about selecting the Page or Article type in your Schema settings. In addition, you can add structured data via the dedicated Yoast SEO structured data content blocks for the block editor.

The Yoast SEO Schema tab lets you set the type of content for specific pages

In addition, or if you don’t use WordPress, you can add structured data via the tags, triggers and variables available in Google Tag manager. What’s more, this way of adding your data gives you an extra amount of flexibility as you can save your variables and reuse them or even dynamically fill them. There are loads of options to explore. Annelieke wrote a post on how to add structured data to your site with Google Tag Manager.

Read our Yoast SEO Schema documentation to see how we work with structured data and how you can extend this.

What can you do with the redirect manager?

The redirect manager in Yoast SEO allows you to create redirects with the speed of a click. It’s so simple, you don’t need a developer to do it for you! Here is what you can do: 

Create different types of redirects

There are different reasons to delete a page, and so there are different types of redirects. These are the redirects you will find in Yoast SEO premium: 

301 Permanent redirect

301 is the right kind of redirect for permanently deleted or moved pages, as well as pages with a refreshed permalink structure. When search engines see the redirect code, they understand that the page is no longer available. So, they stop indexing it – and that’s exactly what you want!

302 Found and 307 Temporary redirect

Both 302 and 307 are temporary redirects. The difference is that the 302 code contains less information about the redirect. 307 is less vague and it tells search engines that the content has a temporary location, but it will be back soon.

410 Content deleted

You can use this redirect when you delete a post or a page for good, and you know for sure it will not be coming back. The 410 code tells search engines that they should delete the page from their index.

451 Content unavailable for legal reasons

Hopefully, you will not have to use the 451 redirect. But, it can come in handy if you ever end up having to remove content due to legal reasons.

Import & export your redirects

With Yoast SEO Premium, you can export and import all your redirects in/from a CSV file. A CSV file gives you a complete overview of all the redirects on your site. The benefit of such a file is that it allows you to make (bulk) changes to your redirect, and import it again when you’re done. The changes are effective immediately!

Create REGEX redirects

Here’s a powerful tool for advanced users! Yoast SEO Premium enables you to create REGEX redirects (Regular Expressions redirects). This means that you can redirect a group of URLs that contain a certain word or expression with one redirect.

One more time, advanced users can rejoice! The redirect manager has been built for scale. By default, we use PHP to fix the redirects. For those that can handle it, we offer the option to write the redirects to a separate file, to include in your Apache or NGINX server config.

Redirecting media and attachment URLs

In Search Appearance, you’ll find a new menu item named Media. Whenever you upload media to WordPress it adds the video or image to the library. In addition, WordPress makes an attachment URL for this piece of media. These are mostly empty pages that serve no real purpose, but sometimes they get picked up by search engines. Previously, we had an option to redirect attachment URLs to their post parent. This didn’t work for attachments that weren’t attached to anything. This new setting redirects all attachment URLs to the URL of the original image or media item. This setting is enabled by default for new installations.

Get Yoast SEO Premium and the Yoast WooCommerce SEO plugin and save $29

This plugin works fine with the free versions of both Yoast SEO and WooCommerce. But do you really want to kick that competition out of the race? Get the Premium version of Yoast SEO so you can:

• Optimize for multiple focus keyphrases per page Don’t miss out on search traffic for synonyms or related terms.
• Preview your page for Facebook and Twitter See your social posts through the eyes of your readers. No more guessing what your page will look like on social media!
• Get real-time suggestions for internal links Stop wasting time manually searching for internal links for every single page on your website.
• No more dead links a.k.a. 404 pages Google and your visitors don’t like those “Page not found” messages.
• 24/7 email support Our knowledgeable support team loves to personally help you with every question you ask through email.
• No ads Get rid of the ads from the free Yoast SEO plugin.

The Yoast SEO sidebar is now full-featured

For some time, we’ve been gradually improving the Yoast SEO experience in the block editor. Today, we’re adding a big one: a much improved sidebar with expandable modals. In this new sidebar, you can now find all the post settings, including the advanced settings, the Schema tab and internal linking suggestions (Premium). Finally, everything is in one place! The sidebar is now on par with the good-old meta box.

Simply click on the tabs to expand them. The one with a down arrow expands in the sidebar itself, while a click on the pencil icon will open a new overlay screen.

The new block editor sidebar in Yoast SEO 15.0

For some time, you could find the Google preview in the block editor sidebar. Today, we’re also adding the social previews to the sidebar. Clicking on the Google preview, will open a new screen with additional settings, like the meta description and title. Premium users also get full-featured social previews in these modals. This is one of the cool features of Yoast SEO Premium, and you now get much quicker access to it — and it looks better as well.

The social media previews in Yoast SEO Premium let you improve your post before sharing it

Консоль

Консоль. Здесь указываются уведомления от плагина, а также проблемы, которые он нашёл у вас на сайте. Часто можно встретить что-то дельное.

Общие. Здесь есть «Мастер настроек», который облегчает настройку плагина Yoast SEO. Однако, мне кажется, что лучше настроить всё своими руками. «Счётчик текстовых ссылок», который показывает, нужно ли увеличить каким-то статьям ссылочный вес за счёт перелинковки. А также присутствуют раздел с информацией «О Создателях» и функция «Восстановление настроек».

Возможности. В данной вкладке можно включать или выключать те или иные функции плагина. Как вы помните, вначале мы именно здесь включили дополнительные опции, которые позволят настроить плагин более тонко. Все возможности оставьте включенными.

Информация о вас. Здесь можно задать данные о вас, которые будут показываться в Google в качестве альтернативного названия сайта. Заполнять не обязательно.

Инструменты веб-мастеров. Здесь можно подтвердить права на сайт в поисковиках Bing, Google и Яндекс.

Безопасность. Здесь можно включить расширенные опции блока Yost SEO, которые позволяют устанавливать уникальные для каждой записи или страницы настройки индексации. Рекомендую включить это, если вы понимаете, о чём речь. Если вам пока это не нужно, то оставьте как есть.

Optimizing page titles after publication

A while ago, while looking at our Google Search Analytics data for yoast.com, I noticed that, while we ranked well for , we weren’t getting a lot of traffic for it. I optimized the page title and meta description for our WordPress security article and this increased traffic by over 30%. My changes to the title were done around the same time as the update – indicated by the vertical line in the graph below:

The change was fairly simple. Instead of the title being:

WordPress Security • Yoast

I changed it to:

WordPress Security in a few easy steps! • Yoast

As you can see, this doesn’t necessarily improve the rankings of this page at all. From a keyword perspective, the title isn’t much better, but it is more enticing, and it did lead to many more clicks, which, of course, was the desired result.

Install Yoast SEO Premium

How to install the Yoast SEO for WordPress Premium plugin: a video manual.

Installing the premium version is a little different than the free version because it’s a downloadable plugin and not one found in the free WordPress plugin repository.If you are upgrading from the free version, please update to the current version and deactivate the plugin before installing premium.

1. Log in to your WordPress website.

   When you’re logged in, you will be in your ‘Dashboard’.

2. Click on ‘Plugins’.

   On the left-hand side, you will see a menu. In that menu, click on ‘Plugins’.

3. Click on ‘Add New’.

   The ‘Plugins’ settings will expand providing you additional options. Click on ‘Add New’.* If you do not see the ‘Add New’ option, your site is part of a network. Please install the plugin through the network admin under ‘My Sites’ > ‘Network Admin’

4. Click the ‘Upload Plugin’ button near the top of the screen.
5. Click the ‘Choose File’ button.

   Browse to the folder where you saved the plugin download and select the plugin zip file.

6. Click ‘Install Now’.

   This may take a while so be patient.If you get an error message like “file is too large” or “The uploaded file exceeds the directive in php.ini” you can contact your host or check our Common Installation Errors.

7. Click ‘Activate Plugin’.

   If you have a network install, you will see the option to ‘Network Activate’. To activate the plugin for all sites within the network, click ‘Network Activate’. Otherwise, go to the individual site’s plugin list and click ‘Activate Plugin’.

8. If you are upgrading from the free version, you can safely remove the free plugin now.

   All previously entered Yoast SEO data and settings are now available in the premium plugin.

9. Please follow the steps to  to the installed and activated plugin on your site.

Think like a search engine

SEO has always been about thinking like a search engine. Search engines want to retrieve as much information as possible, and use it to provide searchers with the best possible answers to their questions. This means we constantly have to ask ourselves; how does a search engine treat information? 

Information on the web is addressable via URLs. Anything that has a URL is something that could be discovered, scraped, indexed, and shown in the search results. WordPress has posts, pages, custom post types, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, different types of archives, special pages, and maybe even more types of content. Do you think a search engine like Google cares about that? It doesn’t really. It just looks for things with a URL, that it can scrape and index.

What we found in other Schema.org implementations

The best Schema.org implementations we see ‘in the wild’ often look something like this, when seen by Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool:

Fragmented Schema.org markup, showing disparate, unconnected entities

There are six Schema pieces on that page, but they’re just that: six pieces without context. It is not clear what their relation to each other is. To a search engine, this page is still a puzzle which needs solving.

In our implementation, which we released in Yoast SEO 11.0 and expanded and improved in subsequent releases, all of the pieces “stitch together”: we form them into a nested structure. Without this nesting, a search engine doesn’t know how all these pieces relate to each other, and what the most important piece on a page is. Our implementation also clearly and explicitly defines the “main thing” on that page. This removes all of the guesswork and adds a lot of context for search engines.

Let’s look at : a post here on Yoast.com. This post is an . The article is the main “thing” of a , which is part of a . This is published by an and written by an . Both the and the have social profiles attached to them. These separate blocks are now all woven together: it’s simply a nested structure.

What does the readability analysis in Yoast SEO do?

The readability analysis uses an algorithm to determine how readable your post is. We’ve carefully crafted this algorithm to make it as accurate as possible without being too strict. It features several checks that’ll give you advice when you write your post. In other words, by following the advice, you can make your text easier to read and understand.

It has been said that Yoast SEO suggests to dumb down your writing. Of course, that’s not the case. We merely want to help people write easy to understand content. I always come back to this quote by content design hero Sarah Richards about making your content as readable for humans as possible:

By simplifying content, you’re automatically growing your audience, as more people grasp the message of your content. Also, you’re not writing your content just for people anymore. Virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri have to be able to work with it as well. And even Google increasingly uses well-written pieces of content for rich results like featured snippets.

That being said, while the advice in the readability section is not the be-all and end-all advice, it does give you important clues to the perceived difficulty of your text. It is crucial to write with readability in mind, as we think readability ranks!

Current readability checks

At the moment, Yoast SEO uses the following checks:

• Transition words: Do you use transition words like ‘most importantly’, ‘because’, ‘therefore’, or ‘besides that’ to tie your text together? Using these words improves the flow of your article as they provide hints to the reader about what is coming next.
• Sentence beginnings: Do any of your consecutive sentences start with the same word? This might feel repetitive to your reader, and that can be annoying. Always keep your sentences varied, so your article is readable and free of obstacles. Unless you want to prove something or use it as a writing style, of course.
• Flesch reading ease: This world-famous test analyzes texts and grades them on a scale from 1-100. The lower the score, the more difficult to read the text is. Texts with a very high Flesch reading ease score (about 100) are very easy to read. They have short sentences and no words of more than two syllables. Usually, a reading ease score of 60-70 is believed to be acceptable/normal for web copy.
• Paragraph length: Some people tend to use extremely long paragraphs. Doing so makes your text look daunting as it becomes just one big blob of text. Break it up, use shorter paragraphs and don’t forget to give your core sentences some thought.
• Subheading distribution: Similarly to long paragraphs, texts without subheadings are difficult to scan, which makes them rather daunting. So, we check if you use enough subheadings to guide your readers through the text and help them find what they’re looking for.
• Sentence length: Sentence length is one of the core aspects that can make a text hard to read. If most of your sentences are too long – over 20 words – people lose track of your point. Readers often have to jump back a few words to find out what you mean. This very tiring and inefficient. Try to keep the number of words in a sentence in check. Shorten your sentences. Aim for easy understanding, not a complex literary masterpiece.
• Passive voice: Using a lot of passive voice in your text makes it appear distant, and your message will be less clear. Your sentences become wordy and difficult because the sentence structure is harder to understand. Whenever you use the passive voice, always consider whether a better, active alternative is available.